


Pseudologoi

by Calyps0



Category: The Blacklist (US TV)
Genre: Angst, But honestly we’re in quarantine so what else are you bingeing?, Canon Compliant, Canon-Typical Violence, Character Study, F/M, Spoilers in the summary in case you haven't seen it, What else is new, in response to Ep. 8.02, lizzie wants answers, red won't give them to her
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-11-22
Updated: 2020-11-22
Packaged: 2021-03-10 00:07:43
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,564
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/27664469
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Calyps0/pseuds/Calyps0
Summary: She sinks back into the chair, as if accepting defeat. “I’m tired of fighting you,” she says.He sits back down, too. If this is winning, he’s never felt worse. “I’m tired of fighting you, too.”ORI decided to write this following Episode 8.02, and as much as I love Lizzington, I have to admit that I've been sure for a while now that Redarina is very likely endgame. (These theories have been beaten to death and back so I won't expand here.) Either way, Lizzie ends up with someone who loves her, which is something she deserves and I think most people want for her. This story is an exploration of that idea, while also providing a little insight into Red's mindscape, and it can be read either as romantic or familial love, depending on your own theories. There's a lot of unanswered questions on this show and sometimes it feels as if more time is spent on shock and awe instead of genuine character interactions/development, and after eight seasons I think we could all do with a bit of healing all around.
Relationships: Elizabeth Keen & Raymond Reddington, Elizabeth Keen/Raymond Reddington
Comments: 2
Kudos: 44





	Pseudologoi

He’s learned some years ago—from his father, he thinks—that yelling is always a last resort. The old man had raged every day and twice on Sundays and the veins at his forehead had bulged and the sink’s tap water had drip-drip- _dripped_ and nothing had ever gotten solved along the way.

But he knows now—after everything, after a lifetime and-a-half and another one after that—that the deadliest weapons are words, made knife-accurate by being soft-spoken. Yelling, by contrast, is a dull, blunt instrument.

So he cuts down associates and enemies alike—coerces with words of promise, pigeonholes with threats of fear, terrifies with soliloquies of deadly intent.

It’s not hard. After all, he can’t remember the last time he was truly angry—anger is a short-term luxury he can’t afford, not least of all because so much retail space inside his head is taken up by the longstanding tenants of sorrow, self-loathing, and regret. Anger seems foreign, untoward, and he cannot often make the leap when he already has far more effective tools lined up neatly right beside him.

So he shouldn’t be surprised that when he finally loses his temper, it is not a fountain but a waterfall, and when he finally raises his voice it is not to coerce or pigeonhole or threaten or terrify or blackmail, but it is simply to release all the pent-up rage that has nowhere to go, and when it finally does it is with _her_.

***

The problem is that Elizabeth is one of the only people on whom his words have very little effect. For whom his words cannot describe, and yet also to whom his words mean _everything_.

She’d walked into his safe house that night, after the post office had wound down and the klieg lights had faded and the streets had filled like buoys with the calm quiet of twilight incertitude. He feels vaporous in these hours, until he arrives back to wherever he happens to be staying—with the room where he happens to fix the bed in the morning (made up with blankets instead of sheets), only to leave it again by next sunrise, untouched—and intends a bit of time to decompress. But instead he hears a sharp pounding _rap-rap-rap_ at the door, and he knows by now the cadence of her fist if nothing else, so he gears himself up for another verbal assault and chides himself for his cowardice—king of words, master and wielder, weakened by her brittle insults (how very far he has fallen and from how high)—and so when he opens the door to find her pink cheeks and windswept hair and sooty eyes staring back at him he still feels vaguely unsettled.

But he’s a gentleman first and an introspective old man second, so he gestures her in and reaches for her coat and she peels it off and crosses her arms around herself as if to contain a certain, interminable heat. Like a live wire, this one. He indulges in a brief but vivid imagining of her as a toddler, vivacious and full of questions, always _why-why-why_. Only this time she is a woman, and now he wishes he could have anticipated that the most important question she would ever ask him is _who_.

And sure, he could tell her the truth. Has imagined it enough that he’s considered several lifetimes’ worth of outcomes. Only four main categories come to mind, though:

  1. She could hit him (he’ll make sure wherever he tells her is devoid of all pens).
  2. She could hug him ( _this_ is foolishly optimistic, even as a hypothetical).
  3. She could kill him (a very real possibility).
  4. She could leave and never come back (this one, he thinks a bit melodramatically, is always the worst).



But he imagines it nevertheless—him sitting her down and regaling her with the whole sorry story ‘till he’s blue in the face, but the truth is that what he’s truly afraid of—more than her knowing _everything_ , having every second of his past for her to peel open and stare into like the pink flayed innards of some dissected creature—is what happens _after._

He doesn’t have a clue what she’d do with the information once she has it. And that scares him too, that he once thought he knew her so well he could anticipate her every move, but desperation has changed the person he sees before him and desperation makes people make inane decisions, ones even he can’t predict. The past few months have been a tumult where he feels as if she is a leaf in the wind and he is just trying to catch her, only to find she has transformed into something else even more evasive and equally flighty, like a garden fairy, or a butterfly.

He could give up every one of his secrets right now, lay them at her feet, and he thinks that would leave her completely directionless. He would stop her midflight, and be left with an insect in a glass jar, kept but not happy, living but without _life_.

He understands she wants the choice to make that decision for herself, but he wants to spare her one more thing that could cause her harm that she would blame him for.

(Alright, so perhaps he _is_ a bit self-serving in that regard.)

But he’s told her he keeps secrets to protect her, and it’s the truth. She’s told him she’ll find out anyway, and he knows she truly thinks so. He wishes he could tell her the truth:

That he will take this secret to the grave, and there is nothing she can do to stop him.

She sits sullenly, as if sensing the morbid direction of his thoughts, and begrudgingly accepts his delayed offer of tea—his mother would berate him for his poor manners (twice in one evening, he mentally tallies)—and as she nurses it he can’t shake the feeling that he never quite knows who to be anymore, not after assuming so many mantles, and none of the identities matter so much anymore anyway, except when he’s with her.

But she’s also got that determined glint in her eye, and that means that it matters more to her in this second than it will in the daylight. It matters to the wooden table and the stovetop clock and the tiled backsplash and the arm of his chair.

The room is full of pure, unwavering intent when she starts yelling.

And, God help him, he starts yelling, too.

***

It starts when he sets the teacup down. She sets hers down, too, but it tips, and a bit sloshes over the rim.

“Hand me a napkin will you?” she stretches a hand across the table.

“It’s alright, I’ve got it,” he replies. A third time and his mother would surely roll in her grave.

But he’s underestimated her persistence, even in matters as trivial as this. “No, I can get it,” she repeats.

He shakes his head, “No really, it’s fine—”

She stands suddenly. “Let me do one thing for once!”

His eyes widen, and he stares at her dumbly. Everything sets her off these days and he wishes sometimes—in those blue sky moments he occasionally lets himself entertain—that he wasn’t always the cause of them.

But her mouth is a firm line. “I wish you could just let me look after myself.”

Why is everything with her always about something else?

“I wish I could do that too,” he murmurs, and starts cleaning the spill.

She stills his wrist with a hand. “I wish you would look at me when I’m talking to you,” she says, with no small amount of venom.

He steels his jaw, raises his eyes. He doesn’t know how she brings it out of him, but every time he’s with her he feels like she’s feeding into his mania, and he’s giving it to her in return. A feedback loop between then, filled to bursting with years of regret.

“We can’t always get what we want,” he says diplomatically, and intends to leave it at that.

She doesn’t seem to have the same compunctions. “No, that’s just you,” she says nastily.

Oh well. He tried. “Well if we’re discussing wishes, I wish you would stop chasing after ghosts.”

She scoffs. “I wish you would let me say goodbye to them first!”

He steadies her teacup when her hands shake the edge of the table. “I wish you weren’t so stubborn!” he growls back.

She flares her nostrils. She wrests the cup from him and upends it. It spills all over the table, drips onto the floor. “I wish you weren’t so controlling!”

He winces more at her words than the mess. “I wish you would just let me protect you!”

“Oh, like you protected Sam and Meera and Tom and—”

He’s halfway through cleaning the mess when the cup shatters in his hand. He abandons tidying entirely and just as suddenly they’re both standing over a table of slowly cooling tea. It does nothing to cool the combined flames of their ire.

He points a warning finger at her. “You have to know that the choices I made were only ever—

“Exactly that!” she interrupts fiercely, “Choices _you_ made for me!”

“And I would make them again!”

“That makes you a monster!”

“And you should be glad you have one over your shoulder instead of under your bed!”

“You paint yourself a savior when everyone I’ve ever loved has been taken away—”

“Perhaps your love has simply been misplaced—”

“And where should I put it, hmm? With _you_? With this stupid safe house and your stupid suits and your stupid bloodlust that never abates and—”

“Why not? Better than the taskforce of yours that only ever endangers you—”

“Why do you act like you care about my safety when all you ever do is try to usurp my choices—”

“ _Your_ choices have led to you being on the run from the feds. Did you forget who was there for you when you _killed_ the attorney general—”

“Because everything _you_ do is guiltless, I’m sure—”

“Don’t make this about me. What about Cuba, hmm, what about that? Do you know how I _felt_ —”

“Don’t you _dare_ bring up Cuba!”

“You ran away from me, when your life is the only thing I ever cared about!”

“Don’t talk to me about saving lives! I hate you more every life you take!”

His breath hitches at that. His throat is sore, his eye is twitching. Her hair has escaped her temples and there are little spatial highlights across her forehead from the incandescents. They are both breathing as if they have run miles.

He lowers his voice. “I don’t care what you think of me, so long as it means you get to live another day.”

She lowers her voice, too. “This isn’t living. Every day that you intervene in my choices, deceive and deflect and hide me from the truth—the truth about my family that is my _birthright_ —that isn’t living. It’s surviving, day to day, and I’m sick of it. I’m tired.” She sinks back into the chair, as if accepting defeat. “I’m tired of fighting you.”

He sits back down, too. If this is winning, he’s never felt worse. “I’m tired of fighting you, too.”

***

It is a few moments more of them sitting silently, surveying the remnants of the ruined cups and saucers and the tea spill that vaguely resembles a prismatic oil spill, and then she rises as if to leave.

He registers the scrape of her chair and raises his head. He doesn’t want her to leave, strangely enough, but it seems she doesn’t, either. She simply stops at the sofa, the worn one with the doilies on its arms that had charmed him when he’d first seen it.

Instead of sitting on it, she sighs deeply, standing along the back and leaning against the taut fabric until she is propped there on the floor, knees-to-chest. She leans back and closes her eyes, and he is struck suddenly by the impression of her as a child playing hide-and-seek. ( _Behind the sofa! Good try, but not good enough!)_ After all, he’s found her already and the game’s just begun.

After a minute he stands, tentatively, and folds himself next to her.

He closes his eyes, too, and breathes with her.

***

“That’s a lie, you know,” she says sometime later, when the mania had drained out of them both and the tea has cooled into the cracks in the grout. He pops his eyes open and she’s turned her head to peer candidly at his profile. “What you said.”

He shifts to face her. “What is?”

“You said you don’t care what I think about you, as long as I’m safe.”

“I _do_ want you to be safe,” he asserts. If he only knows one thing in the world it is this. If he ever was asked to relive the moment of her cold fingers on his face he thinks he’d rather go back to the electric chair.

She shakes her head. “I know,” she says. “I know. But you _do_ care what I think about you. You can say you don’t but I know you want me to care for you. You like it when I say your name. You love it when I love you. You want me in your life.”

The way she is speaking is empty of conceit. There is no pride, no self-importance. It is simply his truth, out of her mouth.

“Some mornings,” she continues, her voice petal-soft, “in the post office, I can tell by the way you look at me when you walk in that I’m the only reason you got up in the morning.”

 _Every day,_ he thinks. _Every day, I swear it._

But she persists. “The reason I know that is because I don’t think you realize how many times you’ve been my reason, too.” She reaches her hand out, and he takes it. Her fingers are warm, and _alive_. He wants to make her more tea, warm her up even more, but he’d rather stay here on the floor with her. Maybe for forever.

“Elizabeth,” he says softly.

“Call me Lizzie. Please. It’s been a long time. Lifetimes maybe.”

“Lizzie,” he says, tasting the sound of it on his exhale. She’s closed her eyes again, lashes fanned out against her cheeks. After a moment he convinces himself to ask, “Would you grant me a favor then, too?”

“Hmm?”

“Call me Raymond.”

She opens her eyes and nods, but her mouth turns down at the corners. “It’s just,” she says, “It’s not your real name, is it? Don’t you want me to call you by your real name?”

He does. He wants that so badly he can’t breathe sometimes. But he shakes his head. “You were born Masha. But Lizzie is who you are. Whoever I was born as is the person I _used_ to be. But Raymond is who I am now.”

“Alright,” she says. It’s a truce for tonight, because tomorrow she will want answers more than her next breath, and tomorrow he will fight for those breaths as hard as he will fight to keep them from her.

“Raymond,” she says, and he holds her fingers tighter.

**Author's Note:**

> Thank you for reading, stay safe! <3


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